I’ve been married for 6.5 years, but it’s taken less than a week for me to fall in love with another. I know, I know, a fickle heart is nothing to boast about… but wait until you see us together.

Meet Edgar. Our love has been a long time in the making. Lengthy visits online to the Vita-Mix website, drooling over recipes, babbling on to friends and family about how “it’s not just a blender” while they pretend to care. Over the course of our marriage I have ruined 3 blenders and 2 food processors, and I knew it was time to step up. So on my monthly trip to Costco for organic quinoa and evaporated cane juice, when I came across a man demoing the Vita-Mix, I stopped dead in my tracks. I sampled some delicious juice made from red grapes, a slice of lime (with rind!) and ice cubes. I gazed at the Vita-Mix with love and longing. When the man confided in me that you don’t need the dry blade container to grind flour, thus saving me about $150 from what I had originally planned to pay, coupled with the bargain price, plus not having to pay with shipping… I was sold. And so Edgar came to join us.

So far we have made juice, soup, smoothies and ice cream. Everything has turned out beautifully and I am in complete awe of the ease of use with this machine, especially clean up! It seems like some too-good-to-be-true dimension, where I can deliciously eat the whole fruit or vegetable, whip up food in a matter of seconds (literally), and clean up just as quickly.

For example, as part of our dinner tonight we had smoothies.

A banana, some soy yogurt, soy milk, frozen mixed berries, frozen strawberries, baby spinach and green powder from Trader Joe’s. With the help of the tamper, in under 1 minute it went from the above picture to this:

Ah, heaven. So, for you green smoothie folks, did you ease yourself in to them or did you just take the plunge? I’m a little scared of drinking all of those greens, raw.

The other part of our dinner tonight was my take on one of my favorite entrees at Blossoming Lotus.

Kale, sauteed with olive oil and garlic, under some Soy Curls that I hydrated with veggie broth, coated in a mixture of nutritional yeast, dried basil and sea salt and then lightly pan fried. On the side, sauteed asparagus. I can never come close to the simple complexity that is Blossoming Lotus, but it tasted pretty darn good.